The Peril of Looking Middle Eastern

A few years back, Mohammad Buhmaid was on his daily walk to the gym in Wilmette, Illinois, a Chicago suburb mostly populated by affluent, white Americans. He saw a woman ahead of him turn and eye him suspiciously. As he recalls, she clutched her son close and hurried away.

Buhmaid, a rich Arab Muslim from Qatar, was an exchange student at the time. He’s now working toward his masters at University of Southern California. I learned of him while attending his old university in the Middle East. He told me he has had many such experiences in the United States.

Once, a woman hugged her bag tighter when he sat next to her on the Chicago L train. He received penetrating stares from strangers while speaking Arabic with a friend. He was also followed around a high-end sports store, because the salesperson believed he might try to steal.

There is nothing extraordinary about any of these experiences. That’s the point.

Min Zhou, a professor of sociology and Asian-American studies at UCLA, says people who are either “Middle-Eastern looking” or “Muslim looking” are very likely to be perceived as a threat. She has personally witnessed her non-Muslim Indian students being harassed because they looked like Pakistani Muslims.

In late May, a man began verbally assaulting two women on a train in Portland, yelling anti-Muslim comments. He then stabbed three men who came to her aid, two fatally. In early June, a man began berating at a group of Muslim girls in a Chicago restaurant, at one point saying, “Get goin’. Beat it. If you don’t like this country, leave.” One woman responded that they were all Chicago residents.

Zhou, who researches international migration and ethnic relations, says long-standing negative stereotypes against certain communities are based on societal prejudices, media narratives and passive acceptance of these beliefs. She believes more communication and interactions, like direct contact between generally segregated communities, are essential to diminish these stereotypes.

“Once you get over the barrier of face to face interaction, I think people can become friends, and then, through this friendship, they would ease out of the prejudice,” Zhou says.

These stereotypes can have toxic effects for all involved. Buhmaid says that over time he became extra cautious about how he interacted with people, and would keep speculating whether anyone misjudged him during these conversations. Sometimes, when he saw white American girls walking ahead of him, he altered his path to avoid any suspicion.

“I began to wear what other young Americans wear here, like shorts, tank tops and jeans,” he says. And he displayed possessions like his smartphone “to show people that I have the money to buy these things for myself and I’m not going to steal.”

But Buhmaid knows that no matter how he dresses or behaves, people will make judgments based on how he looks: “If America puts you in a category, then you don’t get to choose what you want to be identified as.”